Matthew Adams

The age of accusation

In a vigorous, provocative novel, Lawson (who himself faced charges of bullying) attacks the pernicious modern craze for making random abuse allegations

issue 20 August 2016

Mark Lawson’s latest novel, set in Britain in the recent past, presents us with a nation in the grip of ‘moral fever’. Here, the ‘giving offence to anyone at all over anything’ is considered ‘a capital crime’; the ‘post-Savile sexual witch hunt’ has trained people to ‘reinterpret heartbreak as violation’; and retribution comes not just in the form of established legal proceedings, but also of the ‘modern madness of amateur arraignment’.

Lawson wants to show how pernicious this culture can be.

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